The Green Aisle: The invitations & Save the dates

One of  my biggest gripes with wedding planning is all the paper that gets produced and in most cases wasted. There are a lot of options out there, which are beautiful but cost a small fortune. I was determined to have an attractive invitation, without a million enclosures telling people where to stay, etc.

My solution was a three part one. First, I created a wedding website where my guests could go to find more details about the wedding, accommodations, our registry and even things to do in the area.  The best part about this is that it cost me nothing! There are a ton of website designing tools that are free to brides. Mine was produced off of the wedding planning site www.theknot.com. I was offered free sites by tons of other vendors I dealt with too. When you register with David's bridal website they gave me one too, as well as a number of other companies. I just stuck with one to try to make life as easy as possible and less confusing not only for my guests but for me as well.

Next, was the save the dates. I really preferred doing an evite reminder, which would've been the greener solution, but so many people delete those or lose them. I also have a number of older guests coming to the wedding that aren't so computer savvy.  After a lot of research, I discovered having something physical that guests can look at to remind them is  a better solution. Many couples use magnets. They're great, but I didn't want to have to use an envelope that people would throw away in order to send them out, not to mention the extra cost of postage & the magnets themselves aren't that cheap.

I settled on a postcard. I ended up designing it myself on a website called zazzle.com.  I was able to use my own photos and they offered recycled paper as an option for the postcaards. I have to say the print quality on these turned out awesome! My guests have been commenting on how great it looked and they love all the pictures of us they now have on their fridges and desk bulletin boards.

For the invitations, I had a ton of choices. There are so many recycled paper invites, seeded papers and really great handmade items out there. I really wanted to use the theme of orchids and our wedding colors.  I was faced with the decision that I could get the color and theme I wanted but not use eco-friendly materials. Or I could have a green invite but the designs I found had nothing to do with what I wanted. I should also mention that the cost of wither of these options is extremely high. The average wedding invitation runs about $3.50 each and up.

I decided to try my hand at invitation design and use zazzle again.  The result was beautiful, exactly what I wanted and it only cost me a 3rd of the price of a traditional wedding invite.  As far as enclosures, we only have one, the RSVP. It is on a postcard, also made from recycled paper. We printed our wedding website info on the back of the invite, as well as a small map. We also had a note to our guests about reducing their impact by carpooling if possible to eastern shore area.

Yes, doing my invitations myself was much more time consuming and a lot of hard work, but the results are beautiful. I was able to use recycled paper and it cost me a fraction of the cost of a regular invitation. I'd say that is a win win!